my flight of ideas

It was a desperately written script seeking to eke a laugh out of housewives. As pathetic as my attempt to make a literary instrument out of the immediately-preceding sentence in this composition.

In a recent Desperate Housewives episode titled “Now You Know”, a segment goes with this script. The scene is that of Teri Hatcher’s character Susan Mayer questioning her (apparent) obstetrician-gynecologist, to wit:

—Doctor: Susan, I know for a lot of women the word menopause has negative connotations. They hear aging, brittle bones, loss of sexual desire…

Susan Mayer: Before you go any further, can I check those diplomas? I would just like to make sure that they’re not from some med school in the Philippines…
—

Some writer must have been pressured into coughing up quips for the episode. Was his/her job on the line? Was s/he beating a producer’s deadline?

In the American concept of Land of the Free, I think it not the norm for people to have absolute freedom of expression to the point of racially insulting others. Try to crack even a seemingly harmless joke using the wrong expression negro towards black americans and you’ll get a political beating. Try inappropriately saying redheads to native american-indians and you’ll be persona non-grata if you happen to be a tourist.

It just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Last 2006 I had my off-campus elective in Family Practice at a branch of a large multispecialty practice in Houston, TX – and I found the work environment quite harmonious. No patient was out discriminating against a physician of non-American descent, and no staff member found it funny to even joke about another healthcare worker’s ethnic origins.

In fact, that same clinic where I rotated in had two Filipinos among the physician staff, one of them being the clinic’s Managing Physician. She, the manager, being from “a med school in the Philippines”.

I do hope that sense will get knocked into the people behind Desperate Housewives for them to realize their mistake.

I also hope that in the unfortunate event that they figure in a medical crisis, they will receive the best possible care from a Filipino Physician, and in their realization of whose hands their lives are in, they will come to appreciate that medical care is no laughing matter for us Filipinos.